The dance genre has been one that never really took off in the Western market and instead got relegate to all those weirdos you see playing titles like Dance Dance Revolution in your local arcade, which was both admirable but also a little sad. With the advent of both the Wii and Kinect, dance titles had the potential to become pretty popular and, from what we can see, they have. Ubisoft's Just Dance 3 is the first time the Just Dance series has hit Kinect, and also the first real, worthwhile competitor to Microsoft/Harmonix's Dance Central.

Just Dance 3 is presented quite well, to its credit, but doesn't really push the console to its limits, but then really it's not supposed to either. The dancers themselves are animated perfectly, though that's probably because they are just dancers who have been filmed and superimposed into the scenery. The scenery itself is well designed and it's interesting to see all the different styles as they usually mesh well with the song being played. Outside of the scenes that play while you're trying to dance, the menus and presentation of the game feel rather lacklustre and half assed, which is quite disappointing but at the same time something I've come to expect from this series. It would've been nice to see a bit of an effort made though.

As you'd expect, the crux of the gameplay is dancing. There are all kinds of ways to dance too, apparently, and it all depends on how many people are playing too. There's simple modes that just allow the player to pick a song and dance, while there's also quite a few multiplayer modes on offer. Some songs even offer "duet" and "quartet" style dancing, usually these are performances where each of the dancers plays off each others moves, which can either be really fun or really awkward depending on whom you play with. This means that four player dancing is also supported, though it didn't work that well and it was hard to do some of the more intense choreographies without hitting your friend, though it was nice to see that at times Kinect would pick up all four of our movements, even when we stood in a staggered zigzag pattern to save space. Players can also select difficulty, which decides whether Kinect tracks your torso or your whole body, but since this game is obviously built for the Wii, it's incredibly apparent that the foot / leg tracking isn't 100% well thought out which is also quite disappointing.

In addition to the main dance mode, Just Dance 3 also has a feature known as "Just Sweat", which sounds revolting but actually allows players to calculate just how much effort they are putting into their dance. This works to some extent, but at the same time the "sweat" measure is so arbitrary that it's hard to work out just how "much" work you've done. The game does say on some loading screens that a certain amount is akin to doing a certain action (IE. 1000 points of sweat is equal to walking across Central Park once) but these examples are so geographically specific that many of us here in Australia would have no idea what that would equate to. My point here is – why not just use calories or something that we're already familiar with? Sweat mode also allows players to select their songs based on difficulty (as in complexity of moves) as well as the "intensity" which is how taxing it is physically – generally these ratings are quite accurate, as well as "themed" playlists such as 80s, 90s, electronica and all kinds of things.

My biggest issue with Just Dance 3, however, is just how much effort HASN'T been put into the game. The dance choreographies are good but at the same time extremely repetitive, and the songs themselves are full songs so it can get very tiring to play multiple dances across one play through. Everything just feels so unbalanced – I wouldn't mind there being such long performances if they were varied but generally speaking if you're going to have longer songs, then the performances themselves should be fun the WHOLE song, not just the first two times you do it. By the end of the song it's very easy to get bored. Similarly, the actual "flash cards" are incredibly vague so you sometimes have no idea how to properly pull off a move until failing it several times. There's simply no good, decent feedback and you feel like you're dancing to a video clip rather than actually playing a game. As we've previously mentioned, there's quite a few songs and modes to play around with, with over 40 songs being features on the initial track list. From a wide variety of genres and eras, which I will admit, provides a good base for a party game that anyone of any age can enjoy.

Just Dance 3 does have two main features that could either make or break the overall package. The first is the Kinect exclusive JUST CREATE mode, where players can create their own choreographies for the songs, apply a filter to their "model" and upload the choreography to share with other Xbox Live players. While I have no doubt that this feature will find some use, I'm keen to see where it will be in the future, but some of the choreographies, like most user generated content, is dreadful. Similarly, players should be able to download new songs from the marketplace although at the time of writing only three songs have been released and they are all from previous games. Where's the effort Ubisoft?